Ukrainianization,terror and famine: coverage in Lviv's Dilo and the nationalist press of the 1930s

This article looks at the press coverage of Ukrainianization, the Soviet terror, and the famine (Holodomor), particularly in the years 1932–33, focusing on the largest Ukrainian daily outside Soviet Ukraine, the Lviv Dilo. It compares this coverage to the reporting in the press of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). It argues that these two years were a turning point in political attitudes. Galician Ukrainians turned away from the Communist Party of Ukraine and support for the OUN began to grow. Ironically, the OUN had not led protests against the famine, but benefited from the lack of a strong response from European governments and international bodies. The article draws on a reading of the Ukrainian press of the 1930s, and on recent research by Polish and Ukrainian scholars.     

Turks and Tatars in Bulgaria and the Balkans

Generosity is the thought that comes to mind after hearing and later reading the five studies first presented at a symposium in Toronto (2 October 2008) and published here in this issue of Nationalities Papers. My colleagues, who span the disciplines of history, literary criticism, and political science, have been generous with the time they spent in composing their essays and then traveling to Toronto to deliver them in person, and they have been particularly generous in conveying a spirit of constructive criticism and self-reflection that represent the best aspects of our common intellectual enterprise. To each of you – George G. Grabowicz, Taras Kuzio (who initiated this symposium), Serhii Plokhy, Alexender J. Motyl, and Dominique Arel – I express my deep appreciation for your generosity of mind and spirit.     

Foes of our rebirth: Ukrainian nationalist discussions about Jews, 1929–1947

The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, or OUN, came into being in 1929 as an “integral nationalist” movement that set itself the goal of driving Polish landowners and officials out of eastern Galicia and Volhynia, joining hands with Ukrainians in other countries, and establishing an independent state. The OUN defined Jews, along with Russians and Poles, as aliens and enemies. There was no need, wrote an OUN ideologist in 1929, to list all the injuries that Jews caused Ukrainians. “In addition to a number of external enemies Ukraine also has an internal enemy … Jewry and its negative consequences for our liberation cause can be liquidated only by an organized collective effort”. The article examines archival documents, publications by OUN members, and recent scholarly literature to trace the evolution of OUN thinking about Jews from 1929 through the war years, when the German occupation of Ukraine gave the OUN an opportunity to stage pogroms and persecute Jews, and the prime minister of the state that the OUN proclaimed wrote that he supported “the destruction of the Jews and the expedience of bringing German methods of exterminating Jewry to Ukraine”.     

Blocked Mobility and the Rise of Cultural Nationalism: A Reassessment

This paper provides an empirical assessment of the blocked mobility thesis, especially in regard to its use to explain the rise of cultural nationalism. The thesis states that young university students see their upward mobility thwarted and as a result develop nationalist movements which, they believe, will provide them with an independent state and open up career opportunities for them. Using quantitative archival data from Ireland during the early 1900s and Canada during the 1960s, this paper challenges the major assumptions of the blocked mobility thesis. For these two cases it was found that there was neither an overproduction of graduates nor a contracting state structure, two essential preconditions of the blocked mobility thesis. This empirical finding forces us to develop an alternative approach to explaining the rise in cultural nationalism. Part of this paper is taken up with outlining this alternative approach.     

Soviet footprints in St. Peter's Square

Abstract

The collapsing political and economic structures, the rise of Islamic nationalism, and the defeat in Afghanistan are viewed as contributing factors to potential terrorism within the Soviet Union. These factors are discussed within the framework of nationalist terrorism. An attempt is made to predict, based on the current trends, sociopolitical results if nationalistic terrorism becomes a reality in the Soviet Union.     

Gender as Survival: Women's Experiences of Deportation from Romania to the Soviet Union, 1945–1950

This paper offers hypotheses on the role that state social welfare measures can play in reflecting nationalism and in aggravating interethnic tensions. Social welfare is often overlooked in theoretical literature on nationalism, because of the widespread assumption that the welfare state promotes social cohesion. However, social welfare systems may face contradictions between the goal of promoting universal access to all citizens on the one hand, and social pressures to recognize particular groups in distinct ways on the other. Examples from the post-Soviet context (particularly Russia) are offered to illustrate the ways in which social welfare issues may be perceived as having ethnic connotations.     

A Soviet West: nationhood,regionalism, and empire in the annexed western borderlands

This article considers the role the Soviet Union's western borderlands annexed during World War II played in the evolution of Soviet politics of empire. Using the Baltic Republics and Western Ukraine as case studies, it argues that Sovietization had a profound impact on these borderlands, integrating them into a larger Soviet polity. However, guerrilla warfare and Soviet policy-making indirectly led to these regions becoming perceived as more Western and nationalist than other parts of the Soviet Union. The Baltic Republics and Western Ukraine differed in their engagement with the Western capitalist world. Different experiences of World War II and late Stalinism and contacts with the West ultimately led to this region becoming Soviet, yet different from the rest of the Soviet Union. While the Soviet West was far from uniform, perceived differences between it and the rest of the Soviet Union justified claims at the end of the 1980s that the Soviet Union was an empire rather than a family of nations.     

History,memory and nation building in the post-Soviet colonial space

This is an article on Bolshevik nationalities policy and ethnic engineering, asking who, in fact, decided which populations belonged together as ethnic groups (narodnost') and thus had the right of national self-determination, and how the level of autonomy was determined for each ethnic unit. Scholars have dealt with Russian and Soviet nationalities issues for decades already, but they have turned their attention mainly to the larger nationalities (at the level of SSR, and to a lesser degree the levels of ASSR and autonomous oblast). I argue that the lower levels of national territorial autonomy in the Soviet Union (national okrug, raion, volost', and selsovet) are worthy of greater academic attention, at least from the ethnological point of view. Having this kind of low-level territorial autonomy has often been a question of to be or not to be for the small ethnic groups concerned, and hence the subject is connected with the question of preservation of cultural and linguistic diversity in Russia.     

Remembering and forgetting: the state policy of memorializing Stalin's repression in post-Soviet Kazakhstan

The general perception of Western analysts and observers is that the nation-states created as a result of the breakup of the Soviet Union all treat the memory of the dark, repressive aspects of the Stalinist regime in public spaces as a symbolic element in the creation of a new post-Soviet identity [Denison, Michael. 2009. “The Art of the Impossible: Political Symbolism, and the Creation of National Identity and Collective Memory in Post-Soviet Turkmenistan.” Europe-Asia Studies 61 (7): 1167–1187]. We argue that the government of Kazakhstan employs non-nationalistic discourse in its treatment of Stalinist victims’ commemoration in a variety of forms, through the creation of modern memorial complexes at the sites of horrific Soviet activity (mass burial places, labor camps, and detention centers), purpose-built museum exhibitions, and the commemorative speeches of its president and other officials. Kazakhstan's strategy in commemorating its Soviet past is designed to highlight the inclusiveness of repression on all peoples living in its territory at that time, not just Kazakhs, thereby assisting in bringing together its multinational and multiethnic society. Thus, the official stance treats this discourse as an important symbolic source of shaping the collective memory of the nation, based on “a general civil identity without prioritizing one ethnic group over another – a national unity, founded on the recognition of a common system of values and principles for all citizens” [Shakirova, Svetlana. 2012. “Letters to Nazarbaev: Kazakhstan's Intellectuals Debate National Identity.” February 7. Accessed July 28, 2015. http://postsovietpost.stanford.edu/discussion/letters-nazarbaev-kazakhstans-intellectuals-debate-national-identity].     

An unlikely bulwark of Sovietness: cross-border travel and Soviet patriotism in Western Ukraine, 1956–1985

Focusing on the development of travel between the borderlands of Ukraine and Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe, this article explores what it meant to be Soviet outside the Russian core of the USSR between the mid-1950s and the mid-1980s. The cautious opening of the Soviet border was part of a larger attempt to find fresh sources of popular support and enthusiasm for the regime's “communist” project. Before the Prague Spring of 1968 in particular, official policies and narratives of travel thus praised local inhabitants who crossed the Soviet border for supposedly overcoming age-old hatreds to build a brighter future in Eastern Europe. By the 1970s, however, smuggling and cultural consumption discredited the idea of “internationalist friendship.” This encouraged residents of Ukraine to speak and write about the continuing importance of the Soviet border. The very idea of Sovietness was defined in national terms, as narratives of travel emphasized that Soviet citizens were inherently different from ethno-national groups in the people's democracies. Eastern Europe thus emerged as an “other” that highlighted the Soviet character of territories incorporated into the USSR after 1939, helping to obscure western Ukraine's troubled past and leading to the emergence of new social hierarchies in the region.     

Rock 'n' roll nation: counterculture and dissent in Romania, 1965–1975

A vibrant countercultural and dissident movement developed in Romania between 1965 and 1975. Young Romanians combined elements of the global youth movement with local cultural and political practices. Thus, Romanian counterculture and dissent shared the era's hippie aesthetic and anti-authoritarianism, but was highly isolationist, vehemently antisocialist and heavily couched in the language of the nation and nationalism. Furthermore, during this early Ceau?escu period, the socialist regime attracted some level of nonconformist support through a program of reform, opposition to Soviet interference, and nationalist rhetoric. These conclusions demonstrate that the rubric of 1960s counterculture needs to be extended to include a variety of ideological and cultural positions beyond the New Left that scholars generally emphasize. Furthermore, scholarly avoidance of Ceau?escu's early period has obscured the existence of an alternative culture, and has led to an un-nuanced interpretation of Romania's postwar history.     

The Euromaidan and the crisis of Russian nationalism

This article examines the reverberations in Russia of the Euromaidan protests and the fall of the Yanukovych regime in Ukraine. It shows how the events in Kyiv provoked a major crisis in the Russian nationalist movement, which was riven by vituperative denunciations, the ostracism of prominent activists, the breakdown of friendships, the rupture of alliances, and schisms within organizations. Focusing on pro-Kremlin nationalists and several tendencies of opposition nationalists, it argues that this turmoil was shaped by three factors. First, the Euromaidan provoked clashes between pro-Kremlin nationalists, who became standard-bearers of official anti-Euromaidan propaganda, and anti-Putin nationalists, who extolled the Euromaidan as a model for a revolution in Russia itself. Second, the events in Ukraine provoked ideological contention around issues of particular sensitivity to Russian nationalists, such as the competing claims of imperialism and ethnic homogeneity, and of Soviet nationalism and Russian traditionalism. And third, many nationalists were unprepared for the pace of events, which shifted rapidly from an anti-oligarchic uprising in Kyiv to a push for the self-determination of ethnic Russians in Crimean and southeast Ukraine. As a result, they were left in the uncomfortable position of appearing to collaborate with the oppressors of their compatriots.     

Repression and endurance: anathematized Hindu and Sikh women of Afghanistan

Hindus and Sikhs, longtime minority religious communities in Afghanistan, have played a major role in the social, cultural, and economic development of the country. Their history in Afghanistan has not been faithfully documented nor relayed beyond the country's borders by their resident educated strata or religious leaders, rendering them virtually invisible and voiceless within and outside of their country borders. The situation of Hindu and Sikh women in Afghanistan is significantly more marginalized socially and politically. Gender equality and women's rights were central to the teachings of Guru Nanak, but gradually became irrelevant to the daily lives of his followers in Afghanistan. Hindu and Sikh women have sustained their hope for change and seized any opportunity presented to play a role in the process. Active participants in the social, cultural, and religious life of their respective communities as well as in Afghanistan's government, their contributions to social changes and the political process have gone mostly unnoticed and undocumented as their rights, equality, and standing in the domestic and public arena in Afghanistan continue to erode in the face of continuous discrimination and harassment.     

The Soviet origin of Russian chauvinism: Voices from below

The fledgling democracy of Russia is facing many challenges. Perhaps the most dangerous of all is the rise of an aggressive chauvinistic nationalism. Initially, political analysts regarded it as a “recent” phenomenon which was filling in the ideological vacuum left by communism. As time went on, however, scholars began to grasp its deep historical roots and investigate its ideological evolution during the Soviet period. In this process, they tended to focus on the “legitimate” domains of the Soviet system – such as the official press, the literary field of socialist realism, and so on – in order to investigate how “the Russian idea” overtly coexisted or even covertly prospered within the boundaries of officially sanctioned ideology. The main goal of this paper is to bring a new dimension to our understanding of contemporary Russian nationalism, by approaching the whole phenomenon from below. While focusing on the Soviet period, this paper traces the ideological evolution of Slavophiles and their selective degeneration into chauvinism at the social level. In particular, it analyzes the underground ideological field of samizdat – uncensored illicit publications – where Slavophiles played a significant role. In this way, we can hear the “unfiltered” voices of rising Russian nationalists during the Soviet era.     

The birth of modern Circassian nationalism

This article focuses on problems of the national movement of the Circassians – a small nation in the Caucasus, most of whose population is dispersed all over the world. The paper researches the development of the Circassian movement from 1989–2000 and its contemporary structure since 2005. The modern Circassian movement as a whole has never been approached from a political science viewpoint. This research aims to answer several core questions: What are the different strands of the movement? What principles are they based on? Who are the participants? What political forces support them? How do these political forces interact with each other?     

The difficult relationship between nationalism and built heritage: the case of late nineteenth-century Krakow

This paper examines the debates that surrounded the renovation of the royal castle in Krakow during the last decade before World War I. When the Galician crownland took over the castle in 1905, it bore little resemblance to a royal seat, having been used as military barracks since 1846. The debate that followed focused on what should be preserved, what demolished, and what recreated. In this discourse the “meaning” of a historical monument was examined and different interpretations within the circles of architects, preservationists, and artists were propagated. The debate conducted during the meeting of the Central Commission for Research and Conservation of Historic Buildings revealed that the division was not along national lines, but rather among different philosophies of preservation of built heritage. The point made by the paper is that the discourse conducted 100 years ago allows us today to draw conclusions about the role of historical buildings in a national(istic) worldview and examine its inherent contradictions. That is because, I argue, the past as such matters little in the national(istic) understanding, despite its ostentatious interest in history. What matters is the usefulness of historic symbols in the present.     

The rebirth of Chinggis Khaan: state appropriation of Chinggis Khaan in post-socialist Mongolia

A massive monument of Chinggis Khaan (Chinggis Khaan’s name is spelt differently depending on the language in which it was written and on conventions of transliteration. Among the most common are Chinggis, Genghis, Genghiz, or Jengiz. For the purpose of the paper, the Mongolian transliteration is used.) imposingly gazes down from the government palace in Ulaanbaatar, the capital city of Mongolia. The monument was erected in 2006 in commemoration of the 800-year anniversary of the establishment of “the Great Mongolian State.” Occupying arguably the most prominent national space, the monument serves as an arresting emblem of the state. With its silent yet triumphant symbolization, the monument articulates the state’s new ideology in the post-Soviet era. The monument is one of countless symbolic and material grand-scale state expressions appropriating Chinggis Khaan. In this article, I examine the state’s appropriation of Chinggis Khaan as the marker of Mongolian post-socialist national identity. In doing so, I critically examine how the state appropriates history, remembering and forgetting certain parts, to cultivate a shared sense of belonging and pride. Unifying the public in shared glorification and celebration of Chinggis Khaan ultimately serves to instill devotion to the national political and ideological project.     

The venturous bid for the independence of Catalonia

Following an ambiguous constitutional compromise for democratization, the territorial decentralization of the Spanish state developed by means of political party competition, exchanges, and bargaining. Hence, the so-called state of autonomies was characterized as “non-institutional federalism” [Colomer, Josep M. 1998. “The Spanish ‘State of Autonomies’: Non-institutional Federalism.” West European Politics 21 (4): 40–52]. In the most recent period, competition and instability have intensified. New developments include, on one side, attempts at recentralizating the state and, on the other side, demands and mobilizations for Catexit, that is, the independence of Catalonia from Spain, which resulted in sustained inter-territorial conflict. This article addresses these recent changes with a focus on the relations between the Spanish and the Catalan governments. The political changes were analyzed as a result of opportunities and incentives offered by a loose institutional framework and the subsequent competitive strategies of extreme party leaders.     

The Europeanization process and Kurdish nationalism in Turkey: the case of the Democratic Society Party

This study aims at analyzing the impact of the European integration process on Kurdish nationalism in Turkey by focusing on the Democratic Society Party (Demokratik Toplum Partisi, DTP) as the major pro-Kurdish political party in Turkey between 2005 and 2009. It argues that the Europeanization process in Turkey, which accelerated in the post-Helsinki period, has brought about some important consequences concerning the recognition and expression of Kurdish identity. The study examines Europe's impact on the DTP through analysis of party documents and interviews with party representatives, in order to investigate the meaning and use of the European integration process in the DTP's sub-state nationalist ideology. This analysis shows that, although the Europeanization process in Turkey has somewhat broadened opportunity structures for Kurdish sub-state nationalist politics, overall the EU's impact on the DTP's nationalist politics has remained indirect and limited.     

Nationalism and Cultural Memory in Poland: The European Union Turns East

The eastern expansion of the European Union confronts the process of European integration with the phenomenon of cultural and ethnic nationalism. This paper examines the situation of Poland, using Jan Assmann's theory of cultural memory to reconstruct the historical dimension of Polish nationalism which underlies the current constructions of the Polish nation. Understanding itself as the antemurale Europae christianiae, Poland owns an old tradition of resistance. This tradition allowed this country to survive times of division and oppression but now turns against the European Union.